General Details

Name:

Mr Charlton Heston

Gender:

Male

Age:

84 years old

Lived:

Thursday, 4 October 1923 - Saturday, 5 April 2008

My Story

Charlton Heston, who appeared in some 100 films and TV productions in his 60-year acting career but who is remembered mostly for his monumental casting as Moses, Ben-Hur and Michelangelo, died on April 5, 2008.

Mr. Heston died at his longtime home in the Coldwater Canyon area of Beverly Hills, where he and his wife raised their son, Fraser, and daughter, Holly Ann. They all survive him, along with three grandchildren.

In August 2002, Mr. Heston announced that he had been diagnosed with neurological symptoms “consistent with Alzheimer’s disease.”

“I’m neither giving up nor giving in,” he said during the announcement.

Charlton Heston was born Charlton Carter on October 4, 1923 at the small town of St. Helen, Michigan, USA. When his parents divorced in the 1930s and his mother remarried — his stepfather’s surname was Heston — the family moved to the Chicago suburb of Winnetka. He joined the theater program at his new high school and went on to enroll at Northwestern University on a drama scholarship

Mr. Heston’s major breakthrough in the film industry came when he caught the eye of the director Cecil B. De Mille, who was developing the biblical spectacular, “The Ten Commandments.” He became an instant icon for portraying Moses in the film, which was released in 1956 and was more than three and a half hours long and one of the most expensive films made at that time.

Mr. Heston’s next big film was “Ben-Hur.” In the film’s most memorable scene, he and his co-star, Stephen Boyd, as his Roman rival, fight a thrilling duel with whips as their horse-drawn chariots careen wheel-to-wheel around an arena filled with roaring spectators.

“Ben-Hur” won 11 Academy Awards — a record at the time — including those for best picture, best director and, for Mr. Heston, best actor.

He went on to star in many more fictional and historical epics including “El Cid” (1961), “55 Days at Peking” (1963), as Michelangelo in “The Agonay and the Ecstasy (1965)”, “Khartoum” (1966), and “Planet of the Apes” (1968) and its sequel “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” (1970).

Other than being a very successful actor, Mr. Heston was also very active in politic.

He campaigned for many Presidential candidates, Democrats earlier on and by early 1980s Republicans.

He was an active supporter of civil rights in the 1960s and gun rights since the 1980s.

He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1966 to 1971.

In 1998, he was elected president of the N.R.A. In May 2001, he was unanimously re-elected to an unprecedented fourth term by the association’s board of directors. The association had amended its bylaws in 2000 to allow Mr. Heston to serve a third one-year term as president.

In 1997, he was a recipient of the annual Kennedy Center Honors. In 2003, he was also recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.